Milt Gross Character Designs

21 comments:

I never understood why poses and composition were so important to comics until I recently purchased a book called "The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening" which puts together every "Life In Hell" comic into one book. All that is in every panel is a single, expressionless, bunny with dialouge. He might aswell have just written out the dialouge without putting in pictures. But it only cost 5 bucks so I don't really care.

John, have you seen the latest issue of "Animation Magazine"? In it they not only have an interview with several leading cartoon execs saying some incredibly stupid things, they also have the results of a "pitch contest". In that contest, they asked animators and "animation writers" to submit pitches to execs (the same ones in the aforementioned interview). The execs would then judge them. Ultimately, all the pitches submitted were shown, and I cannot even begin to tell you how atrocious all of them are, even the ones chosen as "winners" by the exec judges. All of their ideas are so awful you wonder why they would even want to pitch them, much less have them printed in a magazine. I think it would be great if you devoted a blog entry to all the stupidity and downright awfulness in that issue.

>I never understood why poses and composition were so important to comics until I recently purchased a book called "The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening" which puts together every "Life In Hell" comic into one book. All that is in every panel is a single, expressionless, bunny with dialouge. He might aswell have just written out the dialouge without putting in pictures. But it only cost 5 bucks so I don't really care.<

These are brilliant... I think a lot of the life of it must come from observing humanity. Because however good you get at fun shapes in the abstract, there's got to be some insight there about people and their intrinsic funnyness.

Bubs said...I never understood why poses and composition were so important to comics until I recently purchased a book called "The Big Book of Hell by Matt Groening" which puts together every "Life In Hell" comic into one book. All that is in every panel is a single, expressionless, bunny with dialogue. He might as well have just written out the dialogue without putting in pictures. But it only cost 5 bucks so I don't really care.

I always thought that was the point in those comics. The sheer maudlin nature of that comic- I don't know about the rest of you, but that strip is far and away better than any old prime-time sit-bomb.

Captain Napalm, don't get me wrong, I love the Life in Hell comics and The Simpsons, Futurama etc. All I am pointing out is that actually putting personality into the characters makes a comic more interesting and adds to the humor of the dialouge. I still think that Binky and the rest of the characters in Life in Hell lack personality and life. Use pages 16 and 17 as examples; All that is in every panel is two emotionless bunnies staring at eachother exchanging word bubbles with nothing changing but the position of their arms(which most of the time don't even seem attached to their bodies). Look at the Sheba character for goodness sake, she doesn't make a single expression... her pupils don't even move! Please don't get all "fanboy" on me and lash out with technicalities.

"Ultimately, all the pitches submitted were shown, and I cannot even begin to tell you how atrocious all of them are, even the ones chosen as "winners" by the exec judges. All of their ideas are so awful you wonder why they would even want to pitch them, much less have them printed in a magazine. I think it would be great if you devoted a blog entry to all the stupidity and downright awfulness in that issue."

>Captain Napalm, don't get me wrong, I love the Life in Hell comics and The Simpsons, Futurama etc. All I am pointing out is that actually putting personality into the characters makes a comic more interesting and adds to the humor of the dialouge. I still think that Binky and the rest of the characters in Life in Hell lack personality and life. Use pages 16 and 17 as examples; All that is in every panel is two emotionless bunnies staring at eachother exchanging word bubbles with nothing changing but the position of their arms(which most of the time don't even seem attached to their bodies). Look at the Sheba character for goodness sake, she doesn't make a single expression... her pupils don't even move! Please don't get all "fanboy" on me and lash out with technicalities.<

Oh no, I get where you're coming from. Groening knows he's no wizard with a pencil and he downplays the art a lot of the time, but it bugs me because I think the strips where he DOES stretch out are so good. Take those "category" strips, for instance - you know, the ones where he runs down all the recognizable sorts of brothers, sisters, coworkers, teachers, bosses, etc. Those strips have a new original character in every single panel, and they have some truly hilarious drawings, miles more funny than ANYTHING you would see Binky doing.

That's Groening's problem - unlike the supervisors on The Simpsons, who are trained artists, he doesn't know how to make a point and draw well at the same time. He's either lecturing, playing with words or doing crazy drawings. Rarely does he find a solid middle ground between these things.